Mobile Marketing Tips for Lifestyle Apps

Lifestyle apps are need-based by nature. In other words, these apps don’t exist for entertainment purposes, purchasing, browsing, or shopping. Instead, people come to these apps to help make their life a little easier or solve a specific problem. More than anything, lifestyle apps provide a service to customers.

Given the unique nature of these companies, here are some of the top mobile marketing strategies for lifestyle apps.

Bridge the Gap Between Real Life and Digital

With lifestyle products, customers frequently download the app to accompany and operate the product. For example, consumers who purchase a home alarm system will most likely also download the app that helps them operate the system remotely. In these instances, it’s critical to make sure the two customer experiences flow smoothly together.

Mobile is a tremendous listening post, so you can use your app to gather feedback on the performance of your product and perception of your brand as a whole. It gives you a unique opportunity to communicate with your customers in a more accessible way. Without connecting the two experiences, customers would have to go through a lot more effort and steps to effectively give you any feedback on your product. If your company doesn’t have a way to bridge the gap between real life and digital, you should start exploring that immediately.

Tell a Story

Lifestyle apps have a huge advantage when it comes to marketing compared to other app categories. This is because of the abundance of stories to be told in the lifestyle industry. When we talk about this category, we’re talking about safety apps, wellness and fitness apps, home automation apps, productivity apps, and more. These touch everyone’s lives on a daily basis and provide services or products to improve quality of life, so the stories are never-ending.

Many companies are sitting on a gold mine of stories. Maybe they’ve collected customer feedback, but have no idea what to do with it. But you can use your app or digital experience to solicit, collect, analyze, and act on these stories more effectively when you use a customer experience solution to synthesize it all. Storytelling is one of the most effective and memorable communication methods, so you need to emphasize this in your mobile app marketing strategy.

Follow Proper Procedure Before and After an Update

ClassDojo is one of the most popular apps on Google Play. However, they have a big issue: they didn’t ask for customer feedback correctly before and after a big app update. Look at the most recent reviews.

If ClassDojo had just prompted customers for feedback in-app before and after the update, they could have intercepted all of these negative reviews. When customers rely on your lifestyle app for everyday needs, it’s important to make the customer experience as smooth as possible through updates. Follow these steps to take before and after an app update to help you understand what your customers actually want, intercept negative feedback before it’s public, and capitalize on the people who do like the changes.

Don’t Interrupt the Customer Experience

Lifestyle apps are often used during activities like meditation, working out, house hunting, etc. If you interrupt that experience with notifications or alerts at the wrong time, you can create a lot of friction within the customer experience. Set up your feedback collection strategy to be triggered at the right time and place. Create logic flows that avoid interrupting the user experience and prompt for feedback at the right moment.

Take Advantage of Two-way Messaging

The opportunity to connect with customers has never been greater than when you’re in their pockets. Two-way conversations open the door for hyper-personalized, private communication and close the door on frustrating customer service, impersonal robotic responses, and dead-end communication threads. Two-way messaging is an excellent vehicle for delivering stellar customer service.

Your team can quickly and easily respond to questions, exchange screenshots, and gather information from customers. By humanizing your communication with customers, you build stronger relationships. Conversational marketing is a huge trend right now, and it’s not going away any time soon.

Up Your Social Game and Build a Community

Many lifestyle apps are inherently social. By harnessing the power of social media, you can amplify your brand and share compelling customer stories easier. We’ve seen this be especially For example, Strava has turned into its own social network. What started as a simple fitness tracking app is now a strong community of dedicated customers. Their customers use the app to share success stories, connect with others, and seek support. And when more customers are using your app to build a reputation and a community, it becomes difficult for them to remove themselves from that and delete the app.

You should also focus on making your app ultra-sharable. For example, if people reach a milestone like a new race PR or discover something interesting like a weird sleep pattern, they want to share that with their network. Make sure it’s easy for people to share results like this on social and then engage with them once they’ve done that. Customers will love that recognition and view your brand more favorably when you engage across multiple channels.

Intercept Negative Feedback Before It Hits Social Media

It can be incredibly difficult when something you need and use every day isn’t working properly. When your app or product fails, what outlet have you provided your customers to troubleshoot? Unfortunately, many brands fail to provide the appropriate communication channels for customers to share feedback privately, so they take to social media to share their bad experience. But there are some extremely simple things you can do to intercept those negativities from reaching the general public.

Before blindly directing people to write a review or give feedback, check in to gauge their sentiment first. Ask them a question like, “Do you love us?” If they answer “yes,” direct them to a review site. If they answer “no,” then you can effectively address the issue before it becomes public knowledge. By encouraging disgruntled customers to chat with you in a message center, you’re giving them a more productive feedback outlet and social media or the app store. It is so much more personal and approachable for your customers as well, so you can follow up with questions and updates as you work through their issue. With this channel as a communication option, they’ll feel more comfortable freely giving feedback because they know it won’t be going into a void; there will actually be someone on the receiving end.

This also helps you gather more effective feedback. The nature of lifestyle apps are often highly personal (like menstrual cycle trackers). If people take to social media to complain, they might not give the full story for fear of giving away too much personal information. When you provide a private, one-on-one channel for them to share concerns, customers will be more likely to reveal this information and therefore allow you to have a better picture of the issue to more effectively solve it. 

Take a look at this review on the school communication app, Remind. The customer gave one star and then proceeded to explicitly state there’s no way to resolve issues through the app. This would have been avoided entirely had they provided an opportunity to give feedback within the app.

Use In-app Notifications

What better way to reach your customers than directly in-app? Most likely, they’re already in the app checking in or browsing activities. Notify them about events, important news, exclusive promotions, and other features in your app. You can even prompt them to leave a review or give you feedback. In-app notifications allow you to communicate at scale, proactively reach out to minimize churn and educate and delight customers. You can even use notifications to push people to a survey if customer feedback is something you’re looking to encourage.

Optimize Your App Store Listing

Your options for mobile marketing strategies are limited if people don’t have your app downloaded. But people won’t download your app if they can’t find it or if it has bad ratings and reviews. Adopt a tool like Apptentive to quickly remedy this and start activating your fans to leave awesome reviews and to improve your app store optimization. Make sure your app description and screenshots are compelling and informative, so customers can quickly understand what your app offers. While entertainment and media apps can be more creative in the way they display their app, it’s important for lifestyle apps to be crystal clear about what it looks like and how it works. Many lifestyle apps are using video in their Google Play Store listing for a more engaging way to understand the app.

Don’t know how your app stacks up against others in the lifestyle category? Check out these benchmarks to learn more and identify if you have an issue with your ASO strategy.

Customer centricity and engagement are the hot topics of this year’s business conversations, especially for apps in the lifestyle category. With generally active customer bases comes a constant flow of communication, and lifestyle apps are required to play by a different set of best practices than other apps across the app stores.

All in all, mobile is an excellent listening post for your team to utilize to better understand the customer experience. Proactively gathering feedback is as important for business results as it is for customer experience. Start using in-app feedback tools and using these mobile marketing strategies to drive loyalty and improve overall customer experience.